Some materials have a way of not only resisting efforts to manipulate them but also almost battling back.

That seemed the case when, not long ago, S.F. artist Jonathan Runcio was attempting to work with one of the ungainly, rough chunks of concrete that he screenprints with collages of buildings. While he was printing one raw slab on a dolly, it shifted and his leg was pinned. Fortunately, before a scenario akin to an art-world "127 Hours" ensued, a friend freed him.

Runcio, 34, takes it all in stride. "Some of the shapes get really complicated - they don't sit flat - and they get pretty heavy, obviously," says the artist who holds a bachelor's degree and a master of fine arts from California College of the Arts in painting. Still, the seemingly unyielding blocks of concrete are workably porous. "It's absurd," says Runcio, who first turned to screenprinting after noticing its ubiquity. "Why not screenprint on concrete or brass?"

His new works - on display in "Blue Turns to Grey" at Ratio 3 Gallery - seem to be testing some basic assumptions, upending the foundation and taking apart the architecture that surrounds us. Light-sensitive blueprints have been wrapped around cinderblocks, exposed and then unwrapped, while collages of scanned images of mid-century modern case-study homes have been screenprinted on brass then tarnished with chemicals.

"It's the idea of living outside of nature in this man-made world, where even if something's new, it's going to start falling apart," he says of the work. "The idea of covering up nature and trying to live in that."

Runcio grew up in a Southern California suburb where, as he puts it, "they're constantly tearing down the old Home Depot and building a new one." That swiftly shifting concrete landscape, as well as his family's origins in Uruguay, have impacted his perspective on the world. "I've always been interested in how European models of modernism have broken down, the breakdown of man-made structures and the man-made world," he says. "Modernism and how it was meant to be for everybody and how it's now for people with money."

The artworks themselves are liable to break down and change. "I don't know what's going to happen to the blueprints," Runcio says. "The brass will go brown or black or stay the same, and the concrete - the more you move it, the more the edges will fall off because if you have sharp edges on concrete, it will chip.

"You look at the curbs in this town - they're all rounded off. And there are cracks in these when I cast them. That's the nature of the material - I embrace those cracks."

Runcio's subversive bent extends beyond the pieces to the show itself, which appears to twist the gallery space into a kind of construction site installed with grids that further slice up the space. There also won't be an opening reception because, as he notes, "the works are more about man-made things and not people. I couldn't bear to fill that space with a crowd of people. A lot of people have asked, 'Wow, what's going on?' But I want it to be like an abandoned space that you just encountered. It just starts."